B2B websites should still use hashtags, but as part of content structure, not as decorative labels added at the end of publishing.
It’s fair to ask whether ‘hashtags’ still matter. I refer to them as that (rather than just ‘tags’) to distinguish them from meta tags. We’re talking here about the visible categorisation tags at the start or end of an article. And the answer to the question is yes, I think they do still matter.
Their most useful job, as always, is helping visitors find related material. If someone reads an article on a specific topic, a well-chosen and maintained hashtag at the end can take them to a relevant set of other pieces on the same theme. For example, if we file our case studies in categories to do with product lines, hashtags can cross-index them by market sector. That can be genuinely helpful.
One problem can manifest itself however in the hashtag index pages. A hashtag index page with one short article is not useful – indeed, it says to the viewer that this website (and our company) is not interested in that subject. A hashtag index page that duplicates a category page is not useful either. Nor is an index page with six near-identical posts.
Search engines do not need more weak archive pages. So the practical question is not “should we use hashtags?” but instead “which hashtags deserve to exist?”
For B2B websites, the best hashtags usually reflect topics buyers actually care about. Applications, regulations or buying questions are good ideas. Then they should be broad enough to gather several strong pieces.
In terms of SEO, some hashtag pages may be strong enough to index. If a hashtag page genuinely helps people explore the topic, it may deserve to be discoverable. Many others should probably be noindexed. That’s just good housekeeping. The hashtag can still help visitors on the site without asking skeptical search engines to assess its usefulness.